


Cold night out

by Fafsernir



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Eiselcross (Critical Role), Episode 115, Multi, The empire kids talk, and freeze to dramatic almost death, beau is just cold and complains, reticent cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-24 05:27:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30067359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fafsernir/pseuds/Fafsernir
Summary: Beauregard was cold. She was freezing, and she wanted to feel any heat so badly, but there was no way to warm herself up. She couldn't sleep.
Relationships: Beauregard Lionett & Caleb Widogast, Beauregard Lionett/Yasha, Essek Thelyss/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 2
Kudos: 106
Collections: Winter's Crest Exchange 2021





	Cold night out

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this fulfils the prompts I was given!  
> This is set in Episode 115, on their first night in Eiselcross, when they don't have the tower up, or even the dome. Simply because I started writing it right after that episode, not gonna lie. Enjoy!

It was cold. Extremely cold. No, that was an understatement. It was fucking freezing and they were going to die from the sheer icy, freezing, life-sucking cold. 

Beau was trembling, her arms closely wrapped around herself. They had seen worse, surely. Then why did it feel like it was the worst experience of her life?

They were in the middle of nowhere, outside of anything and everything. They had finally left a stranded island to go to the end of the world and freeze to death for a stupid wizard who had gotten herself killed. Beau didn’t understand what they were still doing here.

Well, she did, because she had too many questions, and Molly-not-Molly was involved and this was all too much for them not to try and understand. But, at this moment, with her toes which might as well not be here anymore, she didn’t care. She wanted to be somewhere else or sleeping peacefully.

She rolled on her side, hoping to warm herself a bit by moving around, and met Caleb’s open eyes.

“Man, you spooked me.” He didn’t answer, not even blinking. “Caleb? Are you dead?” she asked, waving her hand in front of his face. He blinked, and to say she was relieved was an understatement, but she hid any sign of it. “You okay over there?”

“Ah, _ja_ ,” he smiled, even if it turned out to be more of a grimace. “A bit cold.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t noticed. And whose fault is that?”

She knew he was tapped out of his spells energy, or whatever it was called, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do it. It was easier to blame him for not putting up his tower, with the nice baths and cats bringing you hot cocoa and wine. With the fireplaces and the comfortable beds…

She had never needed a whole lot of comfort but, right now, she could only dream of anything better than this. 

“Can’t sleep either?” she decided to say after a while, to make sure he hadn’t died, as he wasn’t answering.

“Not really.”

The cold didn’t seem to be Caleb’s best friend and he was less talkative than usual. Then again, it was Caleb and he had never been very eloquent to start with. 

“Come here,” she gestured, or tried to, her arms stiff. He still got the message, rolling on the ground, closer to her, and pressing his back against her. “Don’t tell anyone. You’re very squishy and punching can only warm me up.”

“Cat’s got my tongue,” Caleb answered and, right on cue, Frumpkin nestled between the two of them. The damn cat wasn’t cold, at least. “Wouldn’t you want to schnuggle with someone else?”

“S _chnuggle_? Is that Zemnian?”

“ _Nein_ , Jester used that word, I think.”

“Well, for your information, yes I would like to 'schnuggle' with anyone else but you.”

“Sure.”

“Shut up,” Beau threatened near his ear and smiled to herself when she heard him chuckle lightly.

She tried to ignore the warmth that suddenly spread from one specific spot on her person. She knew what was there. She could almost feel the paper against her, pushing out to be opened, to be read. Yasha’s poem. Yasha’s poem to Beau. Yasha, big, strong, beautiful woman, had written a poem to her. To Beau. No one had done that before. No one had… taken the time to sit and write a poem to Beau. She didn’t know what to do with it.

Read it would definitely be a solution, but then, that meant that it would be read. That she would know the content of it. She was terrified of its content. What if it was good, so good her feelings would deepen even more? Yasha had written a poem, though. That meant something. Surely, that meant that she cared, too. She wouldn’t just write a poem, right? Caleb didn’t have a poem of Yasha on him, did he? This was romantic. This was not just some words scrambled on a piece of paper. There had to be something.

It was a poem, for fuck's sake. A poem from Yasha. And she was only thinking about it and blushing because she knew it would warm her up, of course. There was no other reason to blush or overthink it, if not to get even a little bit warmer in this cold.

Before long, Beau fell back asleep, dreaming of cuddling Yasha, seeing beautiful wings, reading a love letter full of confessions and compliments in a beautifully written poem. 

Until she woke up again, the cold biting every bit of her skin as her imagination wasn't enough to warm her anymore. She had been dreaming of cosy wings, but now she was just cold, and there were no wings surrounding her. 

“Caleb?” she asked, as he was still pressed against her front, visibly cold and shaking. He mumbled an answer. “You awake?”

“Am now,” he said intelligibly. 

“How long has it been? Since we decided to camp here?”

“It has been 1 hour, 23 minutes and 31… 32… 33… 3--”

“--Okay I get it! It feels like forever.”

“Fingers too cold to even cast the dome.”

“I hate the snow. I hate the cold.” If Caleb were a normal person, he would be smiling at Beau. Except he wasn't normal, so he probably wasn't doing anything, but Beau couldn't see his face, so imagining he was smiling was easier. And it helped her stop her complaints. “Do you really know the seconds?” She asked after a bit, pensive. 

She didn't imagine Caleb's chuckle this time, but she felt it through her body. “I have a good internal clock. It's not that good.”

“Ah, I really thought you knew the exact seconds.”

“Got you,” he tried to say triumphally, but the cold swallowed his enthusiasm.

Beau tried to shake her head, but the cold froze her body too much for this. Caleb had a weird sense of humor, sometimes.

“Hey, Caleb?” she asked after a while, as silence settled between them once again. 

“ _Ja_?”

“Do you… care?”

“About what?”

Beau sighed, realizing she would have to say the words because Caleb couldn't read her mind. Yet. Would he be able to, at some point? It didn’t matter, at that moment. “Do you care about Essek?”

There was a pause as Beau asked the question she thought about every so often. Whenever she remembered Essek and his weird behaviour and the weird eye contacts with Caleb. She was curious and too cold to care about respecting boundaries. He was the one who had started with his shnuggle business, anyway. 

“He's our friend, we all care about him. I think.”

He was already hugging himself but she could feel him nervously gripping his arms, as he so often did.

“I'm not talking about the group's opinion about him.”

There was a long silence, again, and Beau grew frustrated by the second, especially as Caleb rubbed his forearms. She eventually shifted, putting a leg over him and an arm around him, so she could basically control his hands and even his legs. She didn’t really have to, because his entire body suddenly grew stiff and Caleb just froze under her. 

“Does it matter?” Caleb said, very quietly.

Beau sighed. Her standard answer would have been that it didn’t really matter, but she knew how she felt about Yasha, and if Caleb had feelings, then it did matter. It was more complicated because Essek was… Well, Essek was Essek. They had a past and heavy stuff with them. Not that Beau’s own past with Yasha wasn’t complicated, because she could still see her eyes when Yasha had almost killed her. She could still feel the life slowly leaving her body, and those dumb words that had resonated in her mind for a while. “You really do pick your women, huh?” had gone through her head, because even in death she had to be like that.

It was all the more embarrassing that she hadn’t died, but no one had read her thoughts then, so it didn’t really matter. She was extremely aware of it herself and it was enough to feel humiliation, she didn’t need more people knowing.

So Yasha and the group, in general, had some history, true, but Essek had a history with the whole nation, the whole of two nations, without them even knowing it, and it required more than simply a personal journey.

Would it even do anything, if Caleb admitted to feeling something for the wizard? Beau was pretty sure there was something, but also the only comparison she had for Caleb was his reactions to Molly’s general flirting attitude, and his behaviour around Astrid. He wasn’t sure the latter helped all that much, because there was also too much history between these two. What was it with Caleb and dysfunctional people? 

“It’s not as easy as it is for you,” Caleb eventually started again. Beau had opinions about that sentence, but she kept it in. Sometimes Caleb made his story way more tragic than it needed to be, but Beau didn’t really want to tell him that, because everyone dealt with traumatic events differently, and she wasn’t that insensitive to tell him how to think about his past. Although, she sometimes wanted to shake him for a bit so he would fully live in the present. 

“Unfinished business with Astrid?” She tried to offer, in case he wanted to talk about that. He probably didn’t. When did Caleb ever want to talk about something, anyway?

Beau tried to quiet the judgment from her mind. She was cold and exhausted, but that wasn’t an excuse to be outwardly harsh.

“I don’t think so,” Caleb only said.

“Care to elaborate?”

“Not really.”

“Sometimes, I just want to punch you,” she sighed against his ear, and maybe held onto him a little tighter. It wasn’t enough to hurt him - hopefully - but it was enough to be uncomfortable. 

She was amazed by how far they had come and how far they had travelled together. She was amazed by how tight the group was, despite their individual, strong and sometimes clashing temperaments. 

“You know, the less you say about yourself, the more people are going to assume probably false things? Sometimes it can be worse than just the truth,” she told him after he again decided not to answer. She was herself surprised by how wise the words coming out of her mouth sounded like. 

She was less surprised, but all the more frustrated by Caleb’s dismissing hum. Had he not been physically locked into place by Beau, she was pretty sure he would have tried to walk away. It wasn’t like he would freeze more away from the group than he already did now, anyway.

Fuck, Beau had forgotten about the cold briefly, and now she was aware of it again and it hurt to be lying here, in the middle of nowhere, so cold she couldn’t feel most of her limbs, but not cold enough to actually die from it here and there. She wished it was that cold. Especially because they only had been trying to sleep for a couple of hours. 

Beau missed sleep.

Caleb did not, because the reason his answers had become so slow and useless was that he had been falling asleep, in addition to his usual lack of informative answers when it came to himself. He was fully sleeping, and Beau was now just awkwardly sprawling on him, and while it had been a fun way to keep his hands in check so he wouldn’t hurt himself, it now looked like a weird position as she thought about it.

It was barely warming, but she chose not to move. She chose to let Frumpkin give biscuits to her shoulders, still unsure whether she liked that or not. Sometimes it was fun, other times it plainly annoyed her. This time was okay, the scratches were not really burning her skin, but it made her remember that she did, indeed, have skin.

One thing she liked about Frumpkin was when Yasha offered him scritchy-scratchies, and said those words out loud as she did so, rubbing his fur with a soft smile, eyes lit up by the fun she was having. She always seemed to forget people were around when there was a pet-able animal around - or just one she _wanted_ to pet, no matter how unsafe - and Beau loved this. 

She loved a lot of things about Yasha. She loved that she had written a poem to her, and had given it to her. She really needed to read it. They needed to be able to sit and be in a quiet, calm place so she could fully enjoy it, and probably blush harder than she’d ever done. 

Beau loved that Yasha ate bugs and the way she smiled when someone remembered that she did, as if the group wouldn’t know what food she liked. She loved that she picked flowers, and put them in her book. 

She loved her small smile. She loved her eyes and she could lose herself for hours in them. She loved her hair, her face, her wings, her fucking arms, literally everything about her. 

Beauregard really liked Yasha, and she didn’t want to fuck it up. She wanted to read the poem when she was alone and at peace. She wanted to be able to respond to Yasha’s words properly. She didn’t want Yasha to regret her poem, if Beau were to fuck up. So, she wouldn’t.

They would get out of this frozen hell soon enough for Beau to allow herself to woo Yasha too. Not with a poem, she was terrible with those. She would figure something out. Maybe they could beat up some stuff, that sounded like a nice date. 

Beau eventually fell asleep, too, the thought of Yasha warming her heart, and making her forget about the situation, even if only briefly.


End file.
